Update 3. Dynamic target following

Hello dear friends and future players!
It’s been a while since the last update — I was knocked out by a heavy fever and had to take a two-week break from the project. But I’m back on track ✌️

Lately, I’ve been working on the dialogue system — and more broadly, on how characters interact with each other. This turned out to be one of the toughest challenges so far, so I had to break it down into smaller, atomic tasks. One of them is dynamic following of a moving target.

Here’s what I’ve got working so far:

• Characters now react differently depending on distance: if the target is close, they can move almost instantly, but if it’s far away, their path is calculated in a batch with others.

• They can interrupt what they’re doing if their target suddenly moves.

• Movement tick systems overhaul. Previously, visuals lagged behind the logical model by about one second (roughly one or even two cells). This caused weird visual behaviors, especially in dynamic target following. I’ve rebuilt the tick systems so visuals now stay in sync with the logic.

I don’t have a YouTube channel yet, so for now I’m attaching an Gif preview. 

You may notice the character slightly stutters when switching routes — that’s because the target update happens with a small delay of 5 ticks (~0.5s). This is a trade-off I made for architectural consistency: every update goes through tick systems, and the action pipeline itself takes 3 ticks to process via the state machine. At some point, I’ll probably add smoother interpolation for this case, but for now I’m focusing on more valuable features.

I’ll try to share some results on the dialogue mechanics in about two weeks. Stay tuned!